Apple was founded on April 1, 1976 in Cupertino, California. The company was initially slow to gain ground and sales were mediocre at their best. Steve Jobs, one of the founders of Apple, spent most of his days planning out prototypes for his new pieces of technology or working on making improvements to preexisting ones. He worked with a partner named Steve Wozniak, and the two are known as the founders of Apple. Wozniak invented the first Apple computer in 1976, and followed it up with the Apple II computer in 1977. However, both of these products never sold popularly, and Jobs and Wozniak had to keep working at it. The company slowly gained more success as their technology improved, but was suddenly sent into a downward spiral following the development of their expensive Macintosh computer in 1984. Jobs began arguing with coworkers and left the company on September of 1985. Things were not looking very good for Apple at this point.
After rotating through a few unsuccessful CEOs, Apple finally brought Steve Jobs back in 1997 and he immediately brought a new sense of optimism back to the company. That same year, the company invented the iMac which was a huge success due to its easy usage and its aesthetic design. Following this, Apple continued to rise to the top with products such as the iPod and iPhone. They are currently one of the largest companies in the world with a net worth of around $900 billion, and it never would have been possible without the leadership of Steve Jobs.
Sources:
https://www.biography.com/people/steve-jobs-9354805
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1873486_1873491_1873530,00.html
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/03/apple-leads-race-to-become-world-first-1tn-dollar-company
I was curious about what kind of products Apple had made that didn't sell very well. One of them was the Pippin, 100,000 units were made and reportedly not even half of them were actually sold. This was more of a commercial flop than a technical one, it just couldn't compete with the other products coming at the time. Nobody had a good enough internet connection to play online, and the Pippin was too expensive ($599) for many to afford.
ReplyDeleteSource: https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/apple/11-worst-apple-product-failures-3515144/
Interesting post, Ryan. I was thinking about that span of a few years when Jobs wasn't at Apple, and I was wondering what he was doing during that time. In a 2005 speech at Stanford University, Jobs admitted that when he left Apple, he "really didn't know what to do for a few months. [He] felt that [he] had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, and that [he] had dropped the baton as it was being passed to [him]." The day after Labor Day, 1985, Jobs called a former employee and together they launched a new computer company called NeXT. Jobs also helped launch Pixar Animation Studios. And in 1996, when Apple was struggling, it acquired NeXT and returned Jobs to the company that he helped create. In the following year, he became Apple's CEO.
ReplyDeletehttps://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-fire-company/story?id=14683754
great post! I remember from class that Micrsoft invested in apple to save them . Apple would not have been able to produce the imac because they were on the edge of bankruptcy. For Microsoft this investment was a tool to show the world that eliminating all competiton wasnt their only tactic. Before apple began to fall it had been one of Microsoft's more potent competitors. The fact that Job's and Microsoft dropped their competitive nature to step back and assess the situation is quite remarkable and has created the current US technological state. Microsoft was way ahead of apple and knew that even with the investment apple could not take over for quite some time if it were even to happen. This dynamic was quite interesting. If you would like to read further the following article is great.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-what-happened-when-microsoft-saved-apple.html
It's really intriguing to look into the history of things that we use every day. Technology has improved so much within these couple of years, and it's inspiring to see how such a company rose to the top. As we saw in the documentaries, before their times, companies helped/invested and supported each other, which is probably one of the reasons why they still exist to this day. As you mentioned, Apple really worked hard in bettering the aesthetics of their products, which is a very powerful tactic as well. While researching the history of the company, I found an interesting database that stores the history of websites. The website had many snapshots of apple.com from when it was created to now, which really shows the improvement of the company. Here is a snapshot of 2001: https://web.archive.org/web/20010713143009/http://www.apple.com:80/
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